An esteemed Brown University professor now, Gaitskell, 51, was but a few years out of toddler-hood when he taught himself algebra. He soon mastered calculus. Meanwhile, he conducted his first experiments, much to the marvel and occasional alarm of his journalist mother and banker father.

“It started with the usual ones, like you try to do chemistry and you focus an awful lot on trying to blow things up,” says Gaitskell, who grew up in England.

Chemistry lost its luster, but one of its essential elements, what Gaitskell calls “this business of actually trying to measure and predict, to try to understand how theories are put together,” remained in his mind.

Projection, for example.

The question was: “If you manage to have a projectile that comes out of some kind of mechanism at a given velocity, as a function of the angle how far does the thing go and what determines the trajectory?” Water, Gaitskell determined, was “a useful proxy” in seeking the answer.

So the lad got in the tub with a chinagraph pencil and plotted trajectories as he varied the height and direction of the shower nozzle.

“My mother thought I was up to something quite peculiar. I was often experimenting naked because there was water going everywhere and the easy thing to do was” not unnecessarily drench his clothes.

“I had no shame!” Gaitskell says, laughing. “I was trying to get the numbers.”

In the late 1980s, Gaitskell was at Oxford University when dark matter first intrigued him. It had never been seen; it is non-luminous, hence its name. Nor had its existence been confirmed by any other means. But it had long been reliably hypothesized. Nothing else could explain certain properties of gravity and galaxy formation and expansion dating to the beginning of the universe.

“It’s necessary to make any sense of the gravitational behavior of everything, ranging from galaxies to clusters of galaxies to super clusters of galaxies to the universe itself," Gaitskell says.

And it is an awful lot of matter — perhaps nine-tenths or more of all matter, scientists theorize. Which is what so terribly excited Gaitskell and others.

“To say that we don’t know what 90-plus percent of the universe is made of is a hell of an admission,” Gaitskell says. “If you like, it’s the biggest question there could be, which is: What is most of the universe made of?”

Gaitskell built a small device, or “target,” that he hoped would detect dark matter in a series of relatively brief experiments, at least in terms of epic scientific mysteries.

“Needless to say, we all thought it would be wrapped up in five years,” Gaitskell says. Surely, that would be sufficient to detect at least one particle of dark matter, which exists in such vast quantity, albeit so tauntingly shy.

“If you say it’s a particle, that leads you to realize: Oh, hell, that means right now if I hold my hand out, hundreds of millions of these things must be going through my hand per second.”

And yet, not a single one has ever been directly observed.

Gaitskell and his research have earned praise and honors. In 2010, he was elected to the prestigious American Physical Society, the world’s second-largest organization of physicists, “for his leadership and outstanding contributions to experimental searches for particle dark matter.” He is the chairman of the Deep Underground Research Association, which represents nearly 600 scientists involved in underground science.

In an extensive profile last year in Harper’s magazine, his work was described as “a revolution in thought.” And in a 2013 Popular Science article, Corey S. Powell, senior consulting editor for American Scientist, said of Gaitskell’s search for dark matter: “If he finds it, the Nobel committee will very likely come calling.”

Astrophysicist Nigel Smith, director of SNOLAB, Canada's underground center specializing in dark-matter physics and a professor at Ontario's Laurentian University, tells The Providence Journal: “Rick Gaitskell has been a leading player in the field of direct dark matter searches for many years, one of the most fundamental problems facing contemporary physics."

So the quest continues. Almost three decades after it began, it has taken Gaitskell to an old gold mine in South Dakota, where, a mile or so underground, he and fellow researchers experiment with the multimillion-dollar Large Underground Xenon (LUX) project.

That mile of rock is necessary to screen out cosmic rays and other distracting particles. And the LUX detector is vastly more sophisticated than Gaitskell’s tiny first one, which he keeps in his office at Brown.

“We built detectors like that and we saw nothing, and then we built things that were this big,” Gaitskell says, illustrating with his hands, “and we saw nothing, and then we built things that were this size and saw nothing, and we kept having to get larger and larger targets. And we watch longer now. We used to watch for days and weeks. Now we watch for years.”

Gaitskell is certain that one day a particle of dark matter will be detected — if not by him and his team, then by others. He would like to claim the honor, but says if he does not, he nonetheless will celebrate.

“When one has spent so much time trying to find something, what’s even more exciting is then using it to understand the universe. In a sense, searching for the grail is not so much finding it than what it then teaches you."

“Science does not necessarily deliver challenges that can be neatly completed in a five-year time scale or something like that. It may be that you have to spend an entire lifetime. One obviously hopes time doesn’t run out.”

Read more about Gaitskell, his research and his team at the Brown Particle Astrophysics Group site, at particleastro.brown.edu/index.html